Michael Pembroke

There’s an abiding irony to the fact that the United Nations, formed in the wake of a catastrophic global war to keep the peace, instead gave sanction to the first and most significant multinational armed conflict since World War II, not even five full years after Japan’s capitulation. It never would have happened had Stalin not ordered Soviet delegates to boycott that Security Council session in protest over the seating of Chiang Kai-shek’s government-in-exile on Taiwan instead of Mao’s de facto People’s Republic of China. It might never have happened if United States President Truman was not under enormous political pressure due to a hysterical campaign of right-wing outrage known as “Who Lost China” born out of Mao’s surprise victory in 1949, the same year that the Cold War grew much hotter when the Soviets successfully tested an atomic bomb, and fears of global communist domination magnified. It probably never would have found the support of so many other nations if the memories of appeasement to Hitler were still not so fresh and compelling.
“It”—of course—was the Korean War, which took place on a wide swath of East Asian geography that remains unresolved to this very day. Historically, the Korean peninsula hosted at various times both competing kingdoms and a unitary state but was always dominated by its more powerful neighbors: China, Russia and Japan. In 1910, Japan annexed Korea, and an especially brutal occupation ensued. Following the Japanese defeat, the peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel into two zones administered in the north by the Soviet Union and in the south by the United States. Cold War politics enabled the creation of two separate states in the two zones, each mutually hostile to one another. In June 1950, the Soviet-backed communist regime in the north invaded the pro-western capitalist state in the south, which spawned a UN resolution to intervene and launched the Korean War. At first South Korea fared poorly, but an American-led multinational coalition eventually pushed communist forces back across the 38th parallel. The fateful decision was then made by the Truman Administration to pursue the enemy and expand full-scale combat operations into North Korea. This brought China into the war and a long bloody struggle to stalemate ensued. Like a weird Twilight Zone loop, more than sixty-six years later a state of war still exists on the peninsula, and Kim Jong-un—the erratic supreme leader of a now nuclear-armed North Korea who regularly taunts the United States—is the grandson of supreme leader Kim Il-sung, whose invasion of the south sparked the conflict!
The origins, history and consequences of the Korea War makes for a fascinating story that—especially given both its scope and its dramatic contemporary echo—has received far less attention in the literature than it deserves. Unfortunately, Michael Pembroke’s recent attempt, Korea: Where the American Century Began, contributes almost nothing worthwhile to the historiography. This is a shame, because Pembroke—a self-styled historian who currently serves as a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia—is a talented writer who seems to have conducted significant research for this work. Alas, he squanders it all on what turns out to be little more than a lengthy philippic that serves as a multilayered condemnation of the United States.
As the subtitle suggests, Pembroke’s bitter polemic is directed not only at US intervention in Korea, but at the subsequent muscular but misguided American foreign policy that has begat a series of often pointless wars at a terrible cost in blood and treasure not only for the United States but also for the allies and adversaries in her orbit. Many—including this reviewer—might be in rough agreement with a good portion of that assessment. But the author sacrifices all credibility with a narrative that repeatedly acts as apologist for Mao, Kim Il-sung and even Stalin! For Pembroke, Truman takes on an outsize stature of a bloodthirsty monster who is not satisfied with the hundreds of thousands he vaporized at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but is willing and even eager to sacrifice millions more in order to achieve his nefarious goal of global domination. Stalin and Mao, on the other hand, simply had their reasons, and were often misunderstood. Left unexplained is why, invested with that motivation and given that the United States in that era had overwhelming strategic nuclear and conventional superiority, Truman and his successors chose not to deploy that capability to pave a dramatic sanguinary road to hegemony.
To my mind, America’s war in Korea was a calamitous misstep, further exacerbated by the escalation that ensued with the crossing of the 38th parallel after achieving the initial objective of driving communist forces from the south. And one could make a good argument that none of the seemingly endless conflicts the United States has engaged in since that time was worth the life of a single American serviceman or woman. Yet, it is a hideous distortion to disfavorably juxtapose America—warts and all—with the endemic mass murder of Stalin’s Soviet Union. History, as I have often noted, is a matter of complexity and nuance, a perspective that seems utterly alien to Michael Pembroke in a book that is neither a history nor an analysis but simply an almost breathless diatribe that reduces characters to caricature and events to a bizarre comic book style of exposing villainy—but in this case all the villains happen to be American.
Because I received this book as part of an early reviewer’s program, I felt an obligation to plod through it to the very last page. In other circumstances, I would have abandoned it far, far earlier. As a reviewer, rarely would I suggest that a work has absolutely no value to a reader, but here I will make an exception: the best-case scenario for this book is for it to go out of print.

Review of: Korea: Where the American Century Began, by Michael Pembroke https://regarp.com/2019/08/28/review-of-korea-where-the-american-century-began-b...… (mehr)

Pembroke argues that the infuriating arrogance and mistakes of American foreign policy, executed primarily as military policy because of American beliefs in unilateralism, were on display in Korea even before they were in Vietnam. Pembroke’s anti-Americanism certainly has its reasons, though it leads him to suggest that North Korea isn’t all that bad, which doesn’t actually follow. It’s hard to say that letting Russia (and Kim as its client) dominate the entire peninsula would clearly have been the right choice, but Pembroke compellingly makes the case that American missteps ensured a hard-line, brutal right-wing regime in South Korea; might have made partition permanent; and certainly led to incredible waste and death by ignoring the likelihood of Chinese intervention once war began. The chapter on the American use of napalm to bring indiscriminate destruction is particularly hard to read, but conventional bombing and destruction of dams, resulting in civilian famine, also played horrible roles.… (mehr)

Where to begin about this excellent, well-researched history of the Korean War? I'll start with noting this book should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand the continued hostility between the North Korean and U.S> governments.

I didn't give it 5 stars, because of Pembroke's occasional lack of nuance and snarkiness of tone. Why Pembroke chose to neglect US domestic factors beyond what he portrays as the knee-jerk militarism of the national leadership escapes me, for example. If his book is intended for U.S. audiences, he might have also considered that he needed a bit deeper exploration of the causes of that militarism in the post-war period 1946-1953.

That out of the way, this book is the most compact and accurate account of the Korean War I have read in the last decade or so. Pembroke discusses the indiscriminate bombing of North Korea targets, one of the chief reasons that nation distrusts ad fears the U.S., in straightforward language that may come as a shock to the many Americans who never learned how our airplanes leveled every building and destroyed every bridge they could find. He also treats the American attempt to manipulate the repatriation of prisoners of war even-handedly, another issue the average reader may have forgotten or never known.… (mehr)